In recent years, an increasing number of healthcare providers have initiated outpatient or home healthcare programs for their patients. The potential benefits of these home healthcare programs are particularly great for chronically ill patients, such as those suffering from diabetes or asthma, who must treat their diseases on a daily basis. However, the success of these home healthcare programs is currently limited by each patient's initiative and motivation to comply with a prescribed treatment plan for his or her disease.
The most common reason a patient fails to comply with a treatment plan is a lack of motivation to treat the disease when the disease is not causing an immediately recognizable affect. The primary affect of most diseases is pain, and once the pain stops, many patients ignore the disease until the pain returns. Of course, most healthcare issues can be addressed much more effectively through prevention. The challenge is in communicating the preventative concept to a patient in such a way that he or she will be motivated and encouraged to comply with a prescribed treatment plan.
A patient's lack of motivation to comply with a treatment plan also limits the ability of a healthcare provider to aid the patient in treating his or her disease. Many treatment plans require daily monitoring of a physiological condition of the patient, such as blood glucose levels in diabetes and peak flow rates in asthma. Since the patients themselves monitor these conditions in outpatient programs, the provider is often limited to learning each patient's status strictly through patient initiated events, such as an emergency visit or the delivery of the patient's latest medical data. Even with the current availability of remote monitoring devices that store and transmit medical data from a patient's home to a medical clinic, the provider must still wait for medical information whose arrival depends on the patient's initiative.
As a result, the majority of the provider's time is spent with the patients who are the most motivated and eager for treatment, while the greatest medical needs remain with the unmotivated patients who do not visit the provider or transmit their medical data. These unmotivated patients often develop urgent medical needs that could have been prevented with proper plan compliance. Consequently, the cost of treating their diseases is much higher than one might expect given the sophistication of current medical monitoring devices.
The prior art has not taught a restrictive access control system for encouraging a patient's compliance with a treatment plan. However, access control systems have been developed for controlling access to television programming based on the paying of a program fee or the desired censorship of programs containing subject matter deemed unsuitable for all viewers. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,768,229 issued to Benjamin et al. on Aug. 30, 1988 describes a restrictive access control system that includes a three-state switch for limiting television tuning access to only designated channels. U.S. Pat. No. 5,550,575 issued to West et al. on Aug. 27, 1996 discloses a viewer discretion television program control system which relies upon suitability ratings and personal identification numbers of household viewers to restrict television program access.
The systems described by Benjamin and West are not directed at motivating a patient to comply with a treatment plan, nor do they have any mechanism for monitoring a patient's compliance or for controlling program access in dependence upon the patient's compliance. Thus, none of the prior art systems for controlling access to an entertainment program encourage a patient to comply with a treatment plan, nor do they provide for remote monitoring of a patient's compliance.